With the advancement in web technology and the never-ending need of users for more and more information, web service compositions, also referred to as Mash-ups, have become very popular. Web service compositions essentially gather data from more than one source and use it to provide a combined output to the user. The task, however, is difficult for someone with less software programming experience.
Further, if the task has to be outsourced, it also takes up a lot of monetary resources. This happens because of the lack of one individual who has the expertise of performing all the steps required to create a web service composition. A way to remedy this is to distribute the task between multiple workers. This in effect would bring-down the cost required for creating a web service composition.
The concept referred to above is commonly known as crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a technique wherein a task is executed by multiple people. The tasks are typically simple and repetitive, however, require manual intervention. The tasks can be published by a user on an online crowd sourcing platform, where various crowd workers are registered and they can opt to undertake various tasks in return for some compensation. Currently, there are many online platforms which facilitate users to publish tasks which can then be completed by crowd workers. Given the nature of the tasks which are crowdsourced and the remuneration involved, a crowd worker generally tries to complete the work in a very short span of time and also does not comprehensively pay heed to the instructions provided by the user. One of the biggest problems with crowdsourcing is the amount of manual effort required to remove the incorrect responses received from crowd workers and short-list only the correct responses. In various experiments that have been performed, it has been criticized that the quality of output received from the crowd workers is very poor. Possible reasons for the occurrence of these errors have been listed above.
The disclosed embodiments seek to provide an easy to use method and computer program code which can be used by any user to create a web service composition. In the process, the embodiments also seek to alleviate the various problems associated with crowdsourcing of tasks.